Many beverage products employ plant products in their preparation. These plant products are typically prepared in a variety of ways to maximize the yields or percentage of extractable material that can be used to make the beverage. The plant material is often dried, then roasted and flaked or ground into particle or powders prior to being heated in a liquid, normally water to make a beverage, which can be served hot or served chilled or even room temperature.
Beer and other alcohol based beverages use a process of fermentation to achieve the desired alcohol content. A variety of combinations of barley, hops and wheat or oats or rice can be used to make such products. Typically the plant products are cooked to a boil to achieve the right consistency of flavor and taste, the recipes of such drinks are often closely guarded secrets.
The most favorite beverages using plant products are coffee and tea. In coffee, the fruit seed of a coffee plant is harvested, this seed commonly referred to as the coffee bean is used to make a beverage with a 400 billion cup per year consumption worldwide.
Tea employs the leaf of tea plants to make a beverage that is second only to coffee in consumption.
Both of these drinks are made using either the dried roasted ground bean in the case of coffee or dried finely chopped tea leaves in the preparation of tea. In each case very hot water is used to wash extracts from the plant material to create the beverage. The cellular fiber or residue is isolated from the beverage by various means most commonly filtration.
The use of various types of beans or blends of such beans and the amount of preparation such as the degree of roasting can greatly alter the flavor and aroma of the coffee. Similarly teas of different blends or mixtures of leaves can alter the taste of the finished product.
Recently, the beneficial aspects of coffee and tea have been shown. A variety of ingredients or compositions that help prevent a variety of diseases are locked up in the cellular tissue of tea leaves and coffee beans. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,979 sodium bicarbonate is used to create a spike in polyphenols in coffee. The polyphenols simply do not adequately dissolve in the hot water alone. This polyphenolic fraction isolated from the coffee brew has been shown to inhibit a chemical tumor promoter which caused oxidative stress and inflammatory response in mice. In the case of coffee, typically only a small percentage of these nutrients can be extracted. In particular, the coffee bean grounds are encased in an oil crushed from the bean pulp, the oil is hydrophobic and prevents water from effectively penetrating the cellular fibers. Heating the water helps break down this oil, but at best only 10-15% of the extractables are released into the water. This means four to five the times the amount of coffee grounds must be used to make a coffee beverage based on these very low yields.
It has been reported in U.S. Pat. No. 7,228,066 that agitating the grounds by pulsing a fluid spray improves wetting of the coffee material and the agitation helps break down the oils coating the grounds and this helps improve the yield slightly. A stirring coffee press is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,040,218 that has a rotatable blade to stir the coffee grounds while simultaneously compressing and agitating the grounds. U.S. Pat. No. 7,227,728 shows a brewing apparatus with a pre-infusion and pulse brewing of water into the grounds to create turbulence that jostles and promotes more uniform brewing.
The present invention provides a new way to unlock the flavors and nutrients in coffee, teas and other plant based beverages. The present invention's ability to change the plant or seed's cellular tissue response to the water can result in a higher effective yield of extracts deliverable to the beverage than was heretofore possible.